22 October 2007

Global Education Digest 2007

Cover of the Global Education Digest 2007 by UNESCOThe UNESCO Institute for Statistics has released the Global Education Digest 2007: Comparing Education Statistics Across the World. The Global Education Digest is an annual publication that presents the latest statistics on primary, secondary and tertiary education. The 2007 edition contains statistics from more than 200 countries up to the year 2005.

The focus of this year's Global Education Digest is the financing of education. The report draws attention to the fact that public spending on education is concentrated in developed countries. The United States alone accounts for more than one quarter of the global education budget. Countries like France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom have education budgets that exceed the spending on education in all of Sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 15 percent of the world's school-age population but combined spending on education by national governments in the region amounts to only 2.4 percent of the global education budget.

The world is at the midpoint between the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals and the 2015 target date, but without increased spending on education in Sub-Saharan Africa and other regions the goal of universal primary education is unlikely to be met.

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Friedrich Huebler, 22 October 2007 (edited 28 December 2008), Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2007/10/global-education-digest-2007.html